Carnal Ignorance

For a book about a pansexual race of beings who take monthly government-sanctioned holidays to sate their lust, “The Left Hand of Darkness” is quite restrained, even austere. (Imagine what Michel Houellebecq would do with such material. Or Geoff Dyer.)

The sole scenes of consummated kemmer that we are privy to appear in the bits of mythopoeic lore interspersed throughout the novel, hyperstylized rather than naturalistic. Otherwise we witness only rejections: Genly Ai’s of his fellow-prisoner in the truck, Estraven’s of the Sarf agent in the bar. (In both cases the rejected parties are female: coincidence?)

The most erotic moment in the book occurs when Ai puts a question to the Foretellers of Otherhord. The circle of Foretellers includes:

Two Zanies (possible schizophrenics);

Five adepts of “the Handdara disciplines of Presence” (a practice that seems to be akin to the tantric strain of Tibetan Buddhism, involving “self-loss [self-augmentation?] through extreme sensual receptiveness and awareness”), one of them in kemmer;

A Pervert, someone with a permanent hormonal inclination toward being male or female.

As the ritual proceeds, the Pervert sidles up to the kemmerer and initiates a not entirely welcome seduction:

The Pervert of the group…paid no heed to anyone but the one next to him, the kemmerer, whose increasingly active sexuality would be further roused and finally stimulated into full, female sexual capacity by the insistent, exaggerated maleness of the Pervert. The Pervert kept talking softly, leaning toward the kemmerer, who answered little and seemed to recoil.

Once the kemmerer submits to the Pervert’s touch, the Foretellers begin to communicate via an unspoken, electric connection, their minds harnessed by the central figure of the Weaver, a mystic named Faxe. Ai, with his gift for mindspeech, finds himself dragged against his will into the Foretellers’ web of thought, and tries to resist:

I felt cut off and cowered inside my own mind obsessed by hallucinations of sight and touch, a stew of wild images and notions, abrupt visions and sensations all sexually charged and grotesquely violent, a red-and-black seething of erotic rage. I was surrounded by great gaping pits with ragged lips, vaginas, wounds, hellmouths, I lost my balance, I was falling…

The equation of “vaginas” with “wounds” and “hellmouths” is a revealing glimpse into Ai’s psyche, isn’t it? Immediately after this, however, the language shifts:

Hours and seconds passed, the moonlight shone on the wrong wall, there was no moonlight only darkness, and in the center of all darkness Faxe: the Weaver: a woman, a woman dressed in light. The light was silver, the silver was armor, an armored woman with a sword. The light burned sudden and intolerable, the light along her limbs, the fire, and she screamed aloud in terror and pain, “Yes, yes, yes!”

The crooning laugh of the Zany began, “Ah-ah-ah-ah,” and rose higher and higher into a wavering yell that went on and on, much longer than any voice could go on yelling, right across time. There was movement in the darkness, scuffling and shuffling, a redistribution of ancient centuries, an evasion of foreshadows.

Hallucinations of devouring sexual organs give way to romantic tropes with a smack of the medieval—moonlight, armor, a purifying flame—which are then undercut by the screech of madness. The celestial meets the abyss. There’s the magnificent economy and exactness of the line “a redistribution of ancient centuries,” and then we are thrust beyond language: the final phrase, “an evasion of foreshadows,” sounds gorgeous—all that shushing—but disintegrates on closer parsing. (Among other things, “foreshadow” is not, technically, a noun, although I like that Le Guin is forcing it to be one, giving it body, and carnality, as it were.)

Then comes the aftermath, tinged with shame and a vague sense of disappointment:

The kemmerer lay with his head on Faxe’s knees, breathing in gasps, still trembling; Faxe’s hand, with absent gentleness, stroked his hair. The Pervert was off by himself in a corner, sullen and dejected. The session was over, time passed as usual, the web of power had fallen apart into indignity and weariness.

Ong Tot Oppong, part of the first Ekumenical landing party on Gethen, imagines that the Gethenians are “spared much waste and madness” because the sex act is confined to a “discontinuous time-segment” of their lives. (Le Guin is a remarkably supple stylist, shifting fluidly from this kind of psuedo-academic jargon to flights of ecstatic poetry.) But Oppong wonders, “What is left, in somer? What is there to sublimate?” The spooky, slightly kinky ceremony of the Foretellers suggests otherwise: sex is never uncomplicated, even among enlightened androgynes.

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.